Wish You Well

Also by David Baldacci

To my mother,
the inspiration for this novel

Contents

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The story in
Wish You Well
is fictional, but the setting, other than the place names, is not. I have been to those mountains, and also was fortunate to grow up with two women who called the high rock home for many years. My maternal grandmother, Cora Rose, lived with my family in Richmond for the last ten years of her life, but spent the prior six decades or so on the top of a mountain in southwestern Virginia. At her knee I learned about that land and the life there. My mother, the youngest of ten, lived on that mountain for the first seventeen years of her life, and while I was growing up she passed along to me many fascinating stories from her youth. Indeed, both the hardships and the adventures experienced by the characters in the novel would not be unfamiliar to her.

In addition to the stories I listened to as a child, I spent considerable time interviewing my mother in preparation for writing
Wish You Well
, and it was an enlightening time for me, on many levels. Once we reach adulthood, most of us assume we know all there is to know about our parents and other family members. However, if you take the time to ask questions and actually listen to the answers, you may find there is still much to learn about people so close to you. Thus this novel is, in part, an oral history of both where and how my mother grew up. Oral histories are a dying art, which is sad indeed, for they show appropriate respect for the lives and experiences of those who have come before. And, just as important, they document those remembrances, for once those lives are over, that personal knowledge is lost forever. Unfortunately, we live in a time now where everyone seems to be solely looking ahead, as though we deem nothing in the past worthy of our attention. The future is always fresh and exciting, and it has a pull on us that times past simply can never muster. Yet it may well be that our greatest wealth as human beings can be “discovered” by simply looking behind us.

Though I am known for my suspense novels, I have always been drawn to stories of the past in my native Virginia, and tales of people living in places that sharply limited their ambitions, yet provided them with a richness of knowledge and experience few have ever attained. Ironically, as a writer, I’ve spent the last twenty years or so hunting relentlessly for story material, and utterly failed to see a lumberyardful within my own family. However, while it came later than it probably should have, writing this novel was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.